I have a XML file in which I want to sort the Object nodes alphabetically and write them back to the file. The raw file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Package>
  <Objects>
    <Object Type="Package">moB</Object>
    <Object Type="Package">moA</Object>
    <Object Type="Package">moC</Object>
  </Objects>
</Package>

The expected output should be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Package>
  <Objects>
    <Object Type="Package">moA</Object>
    <Object Type="Package">moB</Object>
    <Object Type="Package">moC</Object>
  </Objects>
</Package>

I want to solve this with LINQ, unfortunately I can't get the query to read the Object nodes as a collection for further processing.

var xdoc = XDocument.Load(inputFile);
var orderedList = xdoc.Root.Element("Objects");

CodePudding user response：

I want to solve this with LINQ, unfortunately I can't get the query to read the Object nodes as a collection for further processing.

You are only reading the root node Objects, this will give an XElement object and not a collection, you need to read all the inner Object nodes:

var objectList = xdoc.Root.Element("Objects").Elements("Object");

The result is an IEnumerable<XElement> which you can manipulate with LINQ.

I want to sort the Object nodes alphabetically and write them back to the file.

When you have the collection of Object you can sort it by the inner text:

var orderedList = objectList.OrderBy(x => x.Value); 

And replace the old Object nodes by the ordered ones:

xdoc.Root.Element("Objects").ReplaceNodes(orderedList);

After that it's just a matter of saving this back to the file:

xdoc.Save(inputFile); // will replace the content

If you want to keep the original just save this to a different file:

xdoc.Save("someOtherFile.xml"); 

Here you have a run of the described program, showing the file before and after:

Side note:

Be aware that you have non-printable characters in the posted xml content that will break your program:

CodePudding user response：

Try with this line, in order to select the Objects elements and order them :

var orderedList = xdoc.Root.Element("Objects")
                      .Elements("Object")
                      .OrderBy(e => e.Value);

Then you should create a new xElement to hold the sorted object elements and replace the original with the sorted version, and just save the modified doc!